One evening in August 1976, while driving with my husband and daughter, we spotted a friend coming out of a store in Burlington, Massachusetts. We pulled into the parking lot and got out of the car to talk to her.

My daughter, Dawna, who was six at the time, stayed in the car. As my husband, my friend, and I were talking, Dawna, watching out the car window, said, "Look, it's a flying saucer." We ignored her, as adults sometimes do when they're in conversation. She, as children sometimes do when they're ignored, repeated herself, over and over.

After the third of fourth "Look, it's a flying saucer," my husband said, "It's not a flying saucer." Then he turned to look where she was pointed, and, as he did, he said,"It's a … FLYING SAUCER!"

Suspended in the sky above us was a huge, disk-shaped object, shimmering with white lights.

We were transfixed. Minutes seemed like hours, and we couldn't take our eyes off it.

Burlington is next to Bedford, where there was an air force base. As we stood there, looking up, we heard the sound of an airplane coming from the direction of the base. At that instant, the saucer zoomed away to the north. It was out of sight in the blink of an eye.

We jumped into our car and took off in the direction it had gone, hoping to catch sight of it again. We were unsuccessful, but we did see some young men standing by a car. We asked them if they'd seen anything. They were just as excited as we were and quite relieved, as well. It seems they'd been drinking and they thought they'd had too much.

We went home and called the air force base to ask them what we'd seen. They said it was nothing—just a plane towing something. I didn't believe them. Then, in August 1995, I saw a video on television's Sightings that was taken in Salida, Colorado. It reminded me of the saucer we'd seen many years before. It did not seem to be as close as the flying saucer we saw, but it did seem to be the same shape and it had the same shimmering white lights. I know now that I really did see something more than "just a plane towing something."

—Norma Jean Hissong, Olympia, Washington
March 1997

Excerpted from Strange But True: From the Files of FATE Magazine, edited by Corrine Kenner & Craig Miller